A Colombian judge leads judicial transformation with Copilot
In the Caribbean region of Colombia, a trailblazing judge is pioneering the use of AI to expedite due process and tackle the backlog of cases piling up at her desk.
On a recent day, judge María Victoria Quiñones faced the task of writing the minutes of a public hearing involving a high-profile lawsuit.
The hearing, conducted on Microsoft Teams, a virtual workspace for meetings, was quickly summarized by the judge’s aides with Microsoft Copilot, an AI assistant that helps users with work tasks. The tool identified all attendees and also drafted a summary of the hearing, which was then verified and polished. What used to take six hours was done in a few minutes.
“Justice should be swift,” says Quiñones at her office in Santa Marta, the capital of Magdalena, a touristic and farming province of northern Colombia. “The citizen is at the heart of everything I’ve being doing.”
As one of five magistrates at Magdalena’s administrative court, Quiñones has long championed the integration of AI in Colombia’s judiciary processes. Her strong advocacy focuses on automating repetitive tasks to achieve significant efficiency gains. She actively trains judges, law students and her own aides and interns on the value of AI.
On a board at her office, one note reads: “Automate checklists.” Another says: “Conduct 10 training sessions.” Bookshelves display the numerous distinctions she has recently received for being the “most innovative judge” in Colombia. She has her own website and YouTube channel and in 2023 she became the first judge to hold a hearing in the metaverse.
Currently Quiñones is part of a group of 20 judges across Colombia utilizing Copilot in Teams under a beta program to streamline their work. This initiative is part of an ongoing effort by Colombia’s judiciary to embrace new technology and expedite justice for all citizens, in order to uplift confidence in the judicial system, which remains low, according to the World Justice Project.
The judge proudly notes that she can now issue up to 20 rulings in a week, a substantial increase from the four rulings she managed before adopting Copilot.
She uses the AI assistant daily for transcriptions, summarizing hearings and drafting various judicial documents. Copilot also aids in reviewing grammar and wording, comparing draft rulings and managing internal data.
“For us, this is magic… These tools have come to facilitate and improve judicial work,” Quiñones says.
A far-reaching AI plan
Colombia’s judiciary is among the first in Latin America to embrace AI. The country’s constitutional court ruled in 2024 that judges could use AI tools to speed up processes under specific rules.
The judicial governing body then issued regulations in December, mandating that judges review and verify any AI-generated information and disclose its use. The regulations also prohibit the use of free AI chatbots and the use of AI to “assess evidence, scrutinize facts, make value judgments, or solve legal problems,” like drafting final rulings.
At the same time, virtual hearings have become increasingly frequent in Colombia. What began as a necessity in 2020 during the pandemic, has become a staple in the country’s judicial process. In 2024, virtual hearings grew to 1.1 million, accounting for around 80% of total hearings, with Teams becoming the exclusive provider in October.
The Copilot beta program, launched last year, is set to expand to some 150 participants, including judges and clerks, says Johanna Pimiento, head of digital transformation at Colombia’s judicial governing body.
The primary motivation for using AI is the high level of backlog rates, Pimiento points out. “Judges are constantly overwhelmed … and they need to be able to provide more timely responses. That’s why we are keen to start using AI tools.”
More than 2.5 million cases were pending resolution in 2023, the latest year available, which represents half of all cases, according to Colombia’s judicial authority. The average caseload for a Colombian judge in 2023 exceeded 800 cases. An administrative ruling, for instance, takes 10 years on average to be resolved, according to the judicial authority’s data.
The use of technology doubled the volume of total hearings in the country in the last 14 years, to nearly 1.4 million in 2024, Pimiento says, and the introduction of Copilot is expected to further enhance judges’ productivity and efficiency.
While some judges are resistant to digitalization, most have welcomed the shift, recognizing the benefits of AI in making their work more manageable, Pimiento says, although proper training, data privacy and potential data breaches are among the top challenges.
Microsoft’s privacy policies and commitment to data security are some of the key reasons for Colombia’s judiciary to partner with the company, according to the judiciary’s head of digital transformation. Copilot runs on Microsoft Azure, ensuring that users retain ownership of their data, which is never shared with third parties or used for marketing purposes, she points out.
Improvement in efficiency
Potential benefits are manifold. Judges and their teams can be more productive. Ordinary citizens can gain access to justice while saving precious time thanks to virtual hearings since they don’t need to travel to the courtroom, and it helps lawyers too.
Lawyer, Roberto Serrato, estimates that virtual hearings and AI have cut the duration of judicial processes in half, while also enhancing transparency and accountability of judges and other public officials by facilitating attendance for all parties involved. “The efficiency of the judiciary has greatly improved” with the use of technology, he says.
The possibilities of Copilot applied to justice are almost endless, Quiñones adds: “It has a thousand spectacular things … This is something we couldn’t humanly do before.”
For instance, she recently asked Copilot to compare a draft ruling sent by a colleague with all previous rulings available on one specific topic. She obtained an answer in seconds. Without Copilot, the judge says, her team would have spent a whole morning browsing files. Quiñones uses internal data—over 10,000 digitalized legal cases accumulated and archived over the years.
The judge has even created custom Copilot prompts to streamline her workflow while using several other platforms, including Microsoft Power Automate and SharePoint, tools that optimize work processes and manage content. She then shares best practices with the other judges participating in the beta program through a Teams chat.
Born in Bogotá, Quiñones attended a military school while pursuing a career as a high-performance sprinter. Both experiences instilled in her the discipline and efficiency she now seeks to bring to the judiciary, she says.
Her experiences as a police officer first and later as a lawyer, exposed her to the challenges of the judicial system, sparking her interest in using technology to improve access to justice, a topic she eventually explored in her thesis.
For the judge, the ultimate goal of integrating technology is to provide better public service, especially to those with fewer resources, and be more accountable.
It’s a concern that has particularly troubled her ever since she read No One Writes to the Colonel, one of her favorite books by Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez, who was born in the Magdalena region.
In the novella, a colonel waits endlessly for a government pension that never arrives, which Quiñones sees as a metaphor of the slow pace of justice: “That’s what happens in Colombia’s justice system and in many other places, people waiting and waiting for years to get an answer from the administration.”
Meanwhile, the judge can’t hide her pride in being recognized for her role in the integration of technology and the use of AI in the judiciary. She often jokes that, unlike other parents who struggle with even the TV remote, she teaches her two children how to use devices.
“For me, it’s the opposite—I’m always the one showing them how things work,” Quiñones says with a smile.
Top image: Colombian judge María Victoria Quiñones, who has championed the use of AI for years, at her office in Santa Marta, in the Magdalena region. Photo by Federico Ríos Escobar.